Product Description

Samuel Taylor Coleridge is one of the most influential, as well as one of the most enigmatic, of all Romantic figures. The possessor of a precocious talent, he dazzled contemporaries with his poetry, journalism, philosophy and oratory without ever quite living up to his early promise, or overcoming problems of dependence and drug addiction. The Cambridge Companion to Coleridge does full justice to the many facets of Coleridge’s life and work. Specially commissioned essays focus on his major poems, including The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Christabel, his notebooks, and his major work of non-fiction the Biographia Literaria. Attention is given to his role as talker, journalist, critic, and philosopher, his politics, his religion, and his reputation in his own times and afterwards. A chronology and guides to further reading complete the volume, making this an indispensable guide to Coleridge and his work.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #131518 in Books
• Published on: 2002-10-24
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 284 pages

Review
"[T]he collection as a whole contains many fresh perspectives and can be read with profit by graduate students majoring in Romantic studies." Choice

About the Author
Lucy Newlyn is Fellow and Tutor in English at St. Edmund’s Hall in Oxford. Her published work includes monographs on Romanticism and nineteenth-century poetry.

Customer Reviews

Work Without Hope
While it might seem an impossible and frustrating task, Newlyn's edition of essays on Coleridge manages a feat worthy of Ovid's gods: to impose order on the chaos of Coleridge's life and work.
The most daunting aspect of Coleridgean studies to the scholar is his fragmentary personality- the most difficult step is to determine an approach to a man whose ideas deal with countless concepts in several different media: journalism, poetry, religious guidebook and dramatic critic to name a few.
This book helps by providing the reader with a starting point: the essays break Coleridge into manageable chunks. No book on Coleridge has done this to date while managing to address every aspect of his life (and even beyond- see John Beer's "Afterlife" piece).
The essays themselves are lively and diverse, and are penned by some of the most prominent names in Romantic criticism, some of whom (such as Seamus Perry, James Engell, JCC Mays and John Beer) have overseen definitive editions of his work. Guides to further reading at the end of each essay ease the reader into areas of Coleridgean study, while the chronology and index are useful in finding one's way around the work.
As a minor quibble, the book seldom addresses Coleridge's relationships with the Wordsworths, Lamb, or Southey; while there are many texts in existence that do this already, it perhaps detracts from the completeness of this volume that it makes no extended studies of the question. A single essay on creative interdependence between Coleridge and his intimate contemporaries- analysing writing processes and the symbiotic relations that Coleridge thrived on- would have fit in well.
An invaluable aid to reading Coleridge, either as a starting-point or as a managable means of accessing his more complicated issues. Newlyn's introduction wonders how the twenty-first century reader of Coleridge will receive him- in any case, that reader's task is simplified with the aid of this collection.